EÇA'S TRIP TO THE ORIENT

Luis Manuel Araújo

At the invitation of his friend the Count of Resende, who had gone there on the occasion of the inauguration of the Suez Canal, Eça de Queirós spent two short months in the Orient late in 1869. This experience both instilled a taste for travel in Eça and provided him with the opportunity to exercise the art of writing, thereby making a decisive contribution to both his cultural formation and his future choice of a diplomatic career.
In his notes (published posthumously under the title O Egipto. Notas de Viagem (Egypt, Travel Notes)), the future diplomat and traveller offers his readers lively descriptions of the pharaohs’ tombs, in which he talks about both the gigantic monuments themselves and the surrounding countryside. He evokes his perambulations and adventures in the great and noisy city of Cairo, where he visited the decrepit Coptic vestiges and the Islamic monuments located in the soaring Citadel. He describes the tombs of the caliphs, the ancient Amr Mosque, the Ibn Tulun Mosque and the Al-Azhar University Mosque, all of which are venerated monuments of the Muslim world. He also walked through what is still the compact but loud Khan El Khalili shopping area.
Eça never published these notes, but he used both them and the images he retained of this memorable trip to construct the travels of Teodórico Raposo (in A Relíquia (The Relic)) and Fradique Mendes. There is, however, a clear difference between the two characters: Raposo retraces Eça’s oriental journey, step by step, whereas Fradique Mendes travels to places that the writer never visited (Upper Egypt). We also encounter reflections of Eça´s journey in the person of the Egyptian hermit, Saint Onofre, in Lendas de Santos (Legends of Saints), as well as in O Mandarim (The Mandarin) and Os Maias (The Maias). Lastly, references to Egypt are to be found in Cartas de Inglaterra (Letters from England) and Crónicas de Londres (Chronicles of London). We might add that even the stop on the Island of Malta during the trip across the Mediterranean to Alexandria was to furnish him with a few lines for O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra (The Mystery of the Sintra Road).
Employed in a variety of forms that range from satire to lyricism and from biting wit to historical veracity, the subject of exotic voyages was to provide Eça de Queirós with ballast for the recreation of places and moments that are to be found both in distant China (O Mandarim) and geographically closer to home, in the Portuguese Middle Ages (A Ilustre Casa de Ramires (The Illustrious House of Ramires)). A taste for travel in both time and space which was originally aroused by the exciting oriental trip that he was never to forget.

In Camões - Revista de Letras e Culturas Lusófonas